James Dean's Porsche collides with a Ford near Cholame, California; the actor is dead within the hour
About two and a quarter hours after being cited for doing 65 in a 55 zone, James Dean was still pushing his new Porsche 550 Spyder west toward a weekend road race in Salinas. At the junction of US 466 and SR 41 near Cholame, a 1950 Ford Tudor driven by 23-year-old Donald Turnupseed turned left across the highway without seeing him. The Spyder cartwheeled into a gully. Dean, 24, was pronounced dead at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital at 6:20 p.m., about thirty-five minutes after impact.
Dean died having made three films, one of them, Giant, not yet released. His death mid-career, at the wheel of a car he wasn't supposed to be racing, fixed him permanently as young and unfinished in the American imagination, a template later stars from Elvis to Kurt Cobain were measured against. The crossroads still bears his name on a state highway sign.
QWhy was Dean's Porsche nicknamed "Little Bastard"?
Accounts trace the nickname to either Warner Bros. president Jack L. Warner or stunt driver Bill Hickman, used after Dean refused to vacate his studio trailer, or, in another version, as Hickman's nickname for Dean during a mutual joking rivalry. Dean liked it enough to have custom car painter Dean Jeffries stencil "Little Bastard" on the Porsche 550 Spyder alongside the racing number 130. The car had barely been his a few weeks; he'd traded in an earlier Porsche Speedster that same year to get it. He never raced it competitively before the crash.
QWho else got a speeding ticket that afternoon besides Dean?
When CHP Officer Otie Hunter stopped Dean south of Bakersfield for driving 65 in a 55 zone, Dean wasn't alone on the road, stunt driver Bill Hickman, trailing behind in a separate vehicle, was pulled over and cited too. Hunter's traffic stop happened around 3:30 p.m., roughly two and a quarter hours before the crash at Cholame. It meant two vehicles tied to Dean's convoy picked up tickets on the same stretch of highway that same day.
QWhat happened to Rolf Wütherich after he survived the crash?
Dean's passenger, factory-trained Porsche mechanic Rolf Wütherich, was thrown from the Spyder and survived with a broken jaw, hip, and femur. He recovered from those injuries but never fully escaped car crashes: in 1981, twenty-six years after Cholame, Wütherich died in a separate, unrelated automobile accident. The man who'd been sitting beside the era's most famous car-crash victim became a fatal statistic of the same kind of wreck decades later.
